" 'Skip and the three pigeons entered a cozy, warmly-lit waiting room.  Todd examined a gold-framed degree on the wall, and another searched the floor for bread crumbs.  The one named "Id" fluppled up on a coffee table and tried to peck at a copy of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.' "
            "So now you're Dr. Doolittle."  Dr. Vifps entered the office.
            "Doolittle?  Who's--"
            "Surely your amnesia at least allows for some general gut feeling that my anger-management skills will diminish every time you walk into this office until I turn violent and become a danger to someone, particularly you.  To boot, I highly doubt your insurance will cover hundreds of one-minute sessions scheduled every seven minutes.  At the worst, they'll bring an investigation on my organizational incompetency.  For someone with seven bachelor's degrees, someone's bound to suspect that I've turned autistic and schizophrenic and am trying to send coded messages to a terrorist mole in your local Blue Cross and Blue Shield.
            As Skip was still wrestling with the blue button issue which itself was too much for him, he allowed himself to be distracted from the matter by wondering if a blue cross and shield would offer him some sort of holy crusader's protection against blue buttons.  Or would they just make things worse?  He noticed the pigeons had started conversing about something.  He caught the words "superpigeon" and "narcissist".
            Skip began to devote a little RAM to calculate whether his brain was already scrambled beyond repair and whether he should just give up and ask Dr. Vifps to permanently admit him to the nearest writer's sanitarium.  It could have been his imagination, but one of the pigeons seemed to be attempting to coo a melody from a 1986 Metallica album.  Dr. Vifps scribbled something down in irritation as Skip realized he'd been narrating his thoughts for a short while now.
            "Dr. Vifps, would it be a question that would lead to an inpatient situation if I asked you whether believing that the fate of the known universe depended solely on your actions over the course of a single day, was a healthy world view?
            Dr. Vifps turned his glance from the pigeons, who were in some sort of debate of what their permanent names should be and whether they had to procure a birth certificate or change of name form to make them official.  "What was that, Skip?  Oh, excuse me, I was trying to block out your question, seeing how if you were even thinking such a thing--which your question seems to imply--I'd have to knock you out cold and strap you into a straight jacket before you regained consciousness.  That's something I'd rather not do since the possibility of a sexual molestation lawsuit is even more worrisome than the malpractice charges I might face for letting you get this bad to begin with.  So just keep those types of thoughts to yourself from now on."
            "But I thought...  I mean I was thinking such a horrid psychosis would actually land me some leeway in requesting a temporary mental instability absence from whatever job I currently hold, which if memory serves, had something to do with me forgetting something extremely important."
            "Right you are!  That's even better than my last diagnosis for you.  The Developing Arts Council is sure to grant you a deferment with that.  It is, after all, supposedly the greatest frwoa to ever be written or will ever be written.
            "But I thought that sort of line of thought would get me locked up?"
            "Not if I keep you balanced by playing along with your absurd self-importance until we can figure out how to suppress your ego so you can more gradually come to terms with the reality of your situation."
            "So it's true!"
            "No, I'm simply playing along again.  Are you beginning to feel suppressed and clear minded yet?"
            "Not a bit."
            "Alas, I suspected this would be worse than I feared.  Alright, I'm giving you an official certificate of Complete and Total Indefinite Psychotic Break Syndrome Post Traumatically Crucial to the Very Existence of Existence Itself.  I can't think of any more inflated way to put it, so if you can't obtain a TMI approval this time, you're simply going to have to start contemplating suicide or some sort of desperate DAC hostage situation to force your official deferment.  Now off you go, Skip."  Dr. Vifps turned to one of the pigeons.  "Ed."  The pigeon nodded unexcitedly and fluppled down from the book which he'd somehow managed to get open, and walked through the door to Dr. Vifps' office that Dr. Vifps' was holding open for him.  Dr. Vifps entered it himself as if expecting the pigeon's behavior, as if it had previously booked a session for this time.
            "What in the--"
            "Todd thought Idiot--I mean, 'Id' and I could use some therapy.  I don't see myself as the problem because it's everybody else that seems to be calling me idiot.  I think Ed just likes someone to torture as a self defense of his own stupidity, which I believe justifies my half-duck attempts at abusing my abuser in verbal self-defense, and that I can't even get right.  Or that's my analysis, anyway."
            "You do seem the Odie out of you three."
            "Oh, thanks!  Now I'm a dog.  Great.  More therapy I need.  Ed, are you in there?"
            "Why 'Ed' ?"
            "Id didn't like his name, so we changed it to 'Ed', which he finds a bit less insulting but enough so to get us all by for now without complaint."
            "And I'm Eagle!" the third announced with pride.  Eagle tried to bow in a formal greeting but just flupuppled upward a bit instead.  "Dyslexic.  I'm dyslexic!  I'm going to need therapy.  Ed, wait for me!"  As if hearing him, Dr Vifps's office door opened as if he had already expected Eagle would interrupt them just at this moment to begin defending himself from Id's complaints about his best friend.  Eagle shot himself straight in, prompting a cringe of empathetic sympathy from Skip at the thump of a bird smashing into a closed window.
            "But how did Dr. Vifps know their new names?"
            "I think he used his super shrink telepethy powers.  Or maybe he was just eavesdropping as he was right here in the room.  Ed & Eagle's bickering is kind of hard to ignore."  Todd gave a shameful, apologetic sigh up toward Skip for any abandonment issues surfacing in Skip's mind on top of everything else he had to deal with, since Dr. Vifps was only looking into the waiting room at Todd to come in and not Skip.  Todd glanced at the open door, then back at Skip, then back at the door, then back at Skip, in heavy debate of who in the whole situation was the most screwed up and whether he should stick with them or not.  "I guess I'd better..."  Todd glanced back toward the open door.
            "Go ahead," Skip laughed.  He left the office to search for somewhere the note might be of use.  He left with a comforting feeling of having met a few peers with whom he had something in common.  " 'He wished with an ominously fragile vehemence that he would never forget them.' "

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